When I heard the news of the rampage by Elliott Rodger in Santa Barbara that left six dead and another 13 wounded, I couldn’t help myself from thinking about my big sister, Kate Millett, a godmother of the radical feminist movement.
In the 1970s I was alarmed to hear that Kate, whose serious mental-health issues had agonized her family and friends for years, was organizing a group called The Mental Patients’ Project to propagandize in behalf of the notion that the psychiatric community was stigmatizing people with labels such as psychotic, bipolar, schizophrenic, borderline personalities, etc. and unconstitutionally imprisoning them in mental institutions.
It was ironic: We, Kate’s family, had struggled for years with her psychological disturbances, including brutal sadism from which I suffered great personal trauma. We’d tried many times to hospitalize her so she could get help.
In 1973, I found myself alone with her in an apartment in Berkeley, Calif., where she raged at the world for five days and menaced me physically. I was there to help her. But she needed more than a sister’s love. She couldn’t sleep. She was seeing “little green men” and her eyes were literally rolling around in their sockets.
I reached out by phone to other family members and friends. One conversation was with Yoko Ono, a friend of Kate’s from whom I tearfully begged advice.
Kate has written several books on this aspect of her life (“Flying,” “The Loony-Bin Trip”) chronicling her struggles with sanity — and attacking us for trying to help. Yet she has also consistently claimed that “mental illness is a myth.”
Really? Tell that to the families of those who suffered and died in Santa Barbara. Tell it to Kate’s lover about whom she wrote a book called “Sita” — who committed suicide in response to Kate’s “homage.”
Our older sister, Sally, came from Nebraska to the rescue during that mad moment in Berkeley. She arranged to get some temporary care for Kate. Later, our mother managed to take Kate to court in Minnesota in order to secure her “commitment.”
Yet even in her unglued state Kate was able to mount a shrewd defense, walking out of that courtroom unrestrained. She soon boarded a plane for Shannon, Ireland and upon arrival locked herself in the ladies room for 24 hours until the police broke down the door and committed her to a psychiatric institution.
Later, Kate put “the system” on trial by concocting a “new civil rights movement” for mental patients — “The Psychiatric Survivors Movement.” Thanks in part to her agitation in the ’70s, psychiatric and mental health institutions were forever changed: Thousands of seriously disturbed persons were dumped on the mean streets of New York, left to fend for themselves in a syndrome that soon went national.
So when I heard reports of the horror in Santa Barbara, I sympathized and identified not just with the victims but with the family who tried so very hard to obtain help for Elliott Rodger.
But I didn’t identify with the effort to pretend the Santa Barbara nightmare was all about guns. Half of the people Elliot Rodger killed died by the knife; most of those injured were hurt by his car.
It’s not the weapons (or male chauvinism, which also got some blame) that are responsible for these senseless deaths. It’s the deconstruction of our country’s mental-health system during the long aftermath of the 1960s.
Elliott Rodger’s family pleaded for help from therapists and the police, just as did my own family when my sister went off the rails. And equally to no avail. Thanks in large part to Kate and her fawning band of “liberating” acolytes, there is no system left in this country to deal with people like Elliot Rodger.
God bless the families of the Santa Barbara victims and may we all learn what we should have known all along: Something sane must be done with our mental-health system.
As for my sister Kate, last autumn she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
Mallory Millett resides in New York City. She is a member of The David Horowitz Freedom Center and sits on the board of governors of The Center for Security Policy. A longer version of this article can be found at truthrevolt.org.